Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you
seven men of honest report,

full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business—Acts 6.3

The Spirit of God from his holy realm said, "I should
arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons," Nathaniel
told Gray. Though it had been intimated in previous revelations, here,
specifically, the divine commanded violence, a blood sacrifice, of both the
guilty and the innocent, blood of both the true and false apostles, Christian
slave and Christian slaveholder.

The "enemies" of God in Turner’s
revelation were the slaveholders of Cross Keys, who included men, women, and
children. Those who have been grievously troubled that Turner did not conduct a
gentleman’s war must keep ever in mind that American slavery was an hereditary
system. The system of American slavery was an evil that possessed entire
families—mother, father, and child. And slavery had directed its evil at men,
women, and children—indiscriminately.

Nathaniel Turner had been inherited by the
six-year-old Putnam Moore. John Barrow’s widow condemned her young female
Christian slave, Lucy Barrow, who killed no one, to the gallows, without
sympathy or regard. As in the plagues sent against Egypt and its Pharaoh, gender
nor age is pardoned in divine punishment.

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah also provides lasting
testament to the manner of God’s justice. American history is replete with
bloody Indian wars and the wiping out of entire villages and peoples from the
face of the earth. In modern wars, for the last fifty years, generations have
been born and come of age under the threat of total annihilation.

The slaughter
that was Cross Keys pales in comparison to the great horrors we have viewed in
contemporary times. Millions of peoples have been caught up in mass murder and
wiped from the face of the earth without a whimper from the pious and the
powerful. Holocausts beyond count have been more numerous in the modern
Christian era than ever existed in biblical history.

Though horrendous, there is divine irony in Turner’s
revelation on several levels. The Cross for the remission of sins became the
sword for the punishment of disobedience. As the children of Africa were
sacrificed to the man-made abomination that was American slavery, the spawn of
Satan, so European children would be subjected to God’s divine wrath. As
slaveholders had used weapons to subjugate the people of God, those very same
weapons would be their destruction. This divine directive, also a tactical
military consideration, was extremely elemental to the success of Turner’s
mission.

Laying up weapons and gunpowder contributed to the failures
of Prosser and Vesey, for such preparations needed the tactical involvement of
numerous persons. In contrast to Richmond or Charleston, Cross Keys was a much
smaller community in which the least deviations in the accounting of weapons and
gunpowder would have been more easily discovered.

Turner’s inspired strategy,
however, allowed more flexibility of movement and dynamism in the release of
pent-up frustrations. The more people who knew particulars, the greater the
likelihood of exposure and failure before the "great work" got under
way.

In the community of Cross Keys, Turner did not expect
Christian slaveholders to be "perfected" saints. He did not expect
that every slaveholder should immediately free his slave. Slavery in itself was
not the crux of the problem in Virginia. It was not even a question of working
hard and not receiving just payment. The sins of Cross Keys slaveholders went
far beyond such injustices.

They had become breeders of Christian men and women;
they had few qualms about flesh peddling if it sustained their families. They
corrupted the very foundations of society and human civility. They were killing
Christ in a great portion of humanity.

Turner continued to preach the Coming of the Lord. Though
Turner tread a fine tightrope, such pre-millenarian sermons were common fare for
the times. In the fashion of the times, Christian slaveholders viewed him as
merely an imitator of great men who did in truth converse with God. In those
three years, 1828 to 1831, Turner, however, persuaded the slaves of Cross Keys
to expect the fulfilling of the promise of salvation.

Jesus answered the prayers
of the bondsman, of the pure in heart. God warned Turner about the importance of
secrecy, so as to avoid betrayal: "Until the first sign, I should conceal
it [‘the great work’] from the knowledge of men." The Spirit directed
Turner to keep God’s plan of divine retribution from his enemies in
Southampton The time chosen, God would direct the slaughter, as a divine warning
and retribution.

As he had with Isaiah before him, the divine required Turner
"to make the heart of this people sluggish,/to dull their ears and close
their eyes;/Else their eyes will see, their ears hear,/their heart
understand,/and they will turn and be healed" (6.10). Christian
slaveholders must be reprimanded by a blood sacrifice. For the people of
Southampton, especially those of Cross Keys, did not want to humble themselves
before God’s truth.

Blind and twisted by their own greed and conceit, the
Cross Keys Methodist slaveholders were not willing to listen to God’s
messenger and his revelation: "For I will stretch forth my hand against
those who dwell in the land, says the Lord. Small and great alike, all are
greedy for gain, prophet and priest, all practice fraud" (Jeremiah 6.13).

To the slaves, from 1828 onward, Turner no longer preached
repentance and God’s mercy, rather he emphasized God’s wrath. His judgment
prophecy declared, as did Isaiah’s, that "the old ways were not working
and that God was about to bring them to an end" (Gowan, pp. 62-65). As the
Master reminded us in the gospel of Matthew, all should make themselves ready,
for none knows the day when there will come "wailing and gnashing of
teeth."

And when the sign of the solar eclipse came, noon 12 February 1831,
Turner told Gray, "I communicated the great work laid out for me to do, to
four in whom I had the greatest confidence, [Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam]."
This was Turner’s twelfth reported communication with the divine.

This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a
sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi
for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin
was falsely accused of stealing a white
man's turkeys and was almost beaten to
death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling,
a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem
after learning of the grove owners'
plans to give him a "necktie party" (a
lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for
the United States Army and couldn't
operate in his own home town." Anchored
to these three stories is Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's
magnificent, extensively researched
study of the "great migration," the
exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into
the novelistic narratives of Gladney,
Starling, and Pershing settling in new
lands, building anew, and often finding
that they have not left racism behind.
The drama, poignancy, and romance of a
classic immigrant saga pervade this
book, hold the reader in its grasp, and
resonate long after the reading is done.